SearchMonkey Custom Results Pushed to Users
Posted by James | Filed under Search, Semantic, Web
Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey platform got a little more public today with the unveiling of the Search Gallery – the platform’s official application repository. The gallery already has been open to developers and curious bloggers for a couple of weeks, but Yahoo! is now pushing it to the public at large via a “Customize” drop down menu on all search results. In addition, starting today developers can share applications via external links even if they haven’t yet been approved for inclusion in the official gallery.
"This is the first phase of a larger plan to provide opportunities for viral distribution of SearchMonkey apps," said Yahoo! Search Product Manager Amit Kumar on the Y! Search Blog. "We’re continuing to develop new ways to surface and share useful and high-performance applications in users’ search experience and more broadly on the web, so expect more in the near future."
As of launch, the gallery contains 39 approved applications. These range from apps enhancing Yelp! and LinkedIn results to one that provides a code reference for Ruby related searches.
SearchMonkey has the potential to be very disruptive in the search space. It gives web developers the ability to enhance the display of search results without the ability to influence search rankings. Who better to know how to best display content than those who created it? Unfortunately, the search applications I tried out today mostly didn’t seem ready for public use.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the Yelp! application that I installed didn’t really enhance search results beyond slapping a logo next to the URL. In theory, my search for the Petite Deli in San Francisco should have yielded a Yelp! result with the deli’s address, phone number, rating and links directly to user reviews and photos. The IMDB application (which admittedly appears not to have been created by IMDB) gave me connection errors, and the Last.fm app behaved similar to the Yelp! application for me — it enhanced nothing.
Did Yahoo! jump the gun on pushing the Search Gallery public? Or perhaps have their gallery approval standards been too low and these apps just haven’t been tested thoroughly enough?
Tags: customisation, Search, searchmonkey, yahoo
Yahoo! publishes 26.5 million Microformats
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Semantic, Web
Just a couple of weeks ago Yahoo! announced that it would start to index semantic markup languages such as microformats in its search engine. That’s a huge win for the bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web, and provides an incentive for publishers to adopt semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, and putting microformats to use on its own sites.
Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that it had begun using microformats on its European shopping search engine Kelkoo. Specifically, Yahoo! Europe pushed out the largest yet deployment of the draft hListing format, which is a new format used for marking up classified listings.
The actual number of hListings Yahoo! put out there was 26,456,448, as well as an additional 6,500 hCard listings describing merchants. "This bumper injection of structured data into Kelkoo’s pages makes it ripe for re-use, be that browser extensions to draw out product information on our pages, indexing services aggregating product listing together or mashing up the data for re-use in widgets," said developer Ben Ward of Yahoo! Europe.
Ward also indicated that Yahoo! hoped that other sites would adopt the hListing microformat. "After years of waiting for technology to move the web forward, it’s happening. There’s information out there now to pull off functionality we never had before. As web developers, there’s little to do but slip in microformatted mark-up wherever we can, and start having fun in consuming it," he said.
Tags: hlisting, microformats, semantic web, yahoo
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
